New Evidence on the Timing and Spacing of Births

This is a progress report on an ongoing empirical study of the determinants of life cycle fertility. "The main objective of the early stage of [the] work is to codify the facts in a coherent statistical framework that provides the duration data analogue of the conventional simultaneous equations model." After reviewing the relevant literature the authors present an empirical analysis of data on fertility marital status and work histories for 570 Swedish women born between 1941 and 1945. The data are from a survey conducted by the Swedish Central Bureau of Statistics in 1981. (EXCERPT)